Busy news day for alternative comics, two micro-press comics publisher announced their plans for 2017.

First up, Czap Books and Grindstone comics revealed the 2017 line-up of their joint publishing experiment Ley Lines. Ley Lines is published quarterly and, as per their own description is dedicated to “exploring the intersection of comics and the various fields of art & culture that inspire us. Each issue features a different artist’s take on a different subject matter taken from the larger context of art making, past and present.” This years featured creators are Tommi Parrish, Erik Kostiuk Williams, Shreyas R Krishnan and Evan Dahm. They’ll be exploring the works of William Blake and Lydia Lunch, Kylie Minogue, Abida Parveen and the Surrealists movement respectively.

I’m glad to see this series returning. Ley Lines is one of the most interesting comics series being published right now. Comics are essentially work of art and it’s great to see artists exploring their influence coming from other discipline.

The other news of the day is that micro-press comic publisher INK BRICK launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund the upcoming special edition of their poetry comics journal (also called INK BRICK). For this special issue, INKBRICK has assembled 20 creators to create an 80 page full colour comics poetry anthology. It’s an impressive lineup of creators. The crowdfunding campaign aims to help publish this latest journal, compensating creators properly and it also serves as a pre-ordering incentive. Additionally, it appears that this latest issue will get a larger print run and will be distributed to bookstores. This should provide a wider visibility to a number of creators who work aren’t typically distributed by large book stores.

The aim of INK BRICK as stated in their crowdfunding campaign : comics are a powerful medium for storytelling and beautiful artwork. But what other expressive possibilities are hidden in the form? What new things can we say with all the elements of the comics page—the panel arrangements, cartooning, word balloons and captions, lettering styles, and on and on? In short, what else can comics do?

I like INK BRICK, they use an interesting format and they publish comic artists I wouldn’t have discovered without them. I’m always grateful for new work by Andrea Tsurumi and Sophia Wiedeman and am glad to see them in this anthology. The crowdfunding page also has a lot of preview pages of the issue to give you a very good sense of what it will look like.

You can help support INK BRICK crowdfunding campaign and pre-order their latest books on Kickstarter

Philippe Leblanc is a Canadian comics journalist. In his regular life, he improves Canadian medical education, and is the co-host of the Ottawa Comic Book Club. He reads alternative, indie and art comics at night and write about them for the Comics Beat.